Growing congestion on Delhi roads likely to reduce speeds to 5kmph

Delhi has six million vehicles with 1,200 more added daily. But road space is not increasing at the same pace.

Traffic has been a pressing in Delhi and the state govt. is unable to deal with it effectively.

Get ready to crawl at 5kmph during peak hours on all major roads of Delhi in the next five years as traffic congestion grows.

At that speed that is likely to leave fewer dents on your car but is sure to damage the egos of motorists and carmakers alike, and possibly sales, it will take you nearly three hours to reach office located just 15km away from home.

The doomsday scenario has been forecast by a host of agencies such as the Central Road Research Institute(CRRI), Centre for Science and Environment(CSE) and the Railway Infrastructure Technical & Economic Services(RITES) on the basis of studies undertaken by them.

"Delhi's congestion has doubled in the last eight to 10 years and threatens to fail all projections. The capital's congestion is worst among 35 Indian cities and is four times more than Mumbai and Bangalore," CRRI senior scientist K. Ravinder said.

Anumita Roychowdhury of the CSE said, "Assessments carried out on the Ring Road and on some prominent roads show these are overstretched.

The Ring Road's total length is 48km and is a six-lane carriageway.

This was designed to carry about 75,000 vehicles a day. But the road carries 1.6 lakh vehicles per day and is expected to carry about 4 lakh vehicles by 2016." Jolted by the dire warning, the Union urban development ministry is already working on a solution.

Choked roads

Congestion is growing at zip, zap, zoom speed as thousands of new vehicles are added to the city's roads every day. Delhi has six million vehicles with 1,200 more added daily. But road space isn't increasing at the same pace and very soon Delhi's roads will become inadequate to handle the growing traffic volume, warn traffic experts.

Consequently, the top speed during peak hours will drop to 5kmph, they say. Right now, traffic in the city moves at a snail's pace only in gridlock stretches or during the monsoon when streets become waterlogged.

In five years, it will crawl round the year on all city roads.

A top speed of 5kmph, much slower than the speed of a bicycle which moves at 15-20kmph on an average, would also burn more fuel. So, you will shell out more at the gas station too.

Although the projection is for 2020, road experts and urban development ministry officials fear "if the growing congestion on Delhi roads is not fixed on time, the worst-case scenario will be advanced by five years".

Already, Delhi and Mumbai, an ongoing study says, are recording 15-16kmph top speeds during peak hours, eroding companies' productivity by way of lost man hours. About 40 per cent productivity is being lost to time wasted on the road, says an IBM study on commuter pain in global cities.

A study in South Delhi and the capital's satellite cities Noida, Greater Noida, Gurgaon and Dwarka has found that motorists crawl at 4kmph for almost 24 minutes in two hours of driving, wasting 2 lakh litres of fuel for every one million cars plying daily.

It said, "Six years of Delhiites' careers are spent in snarls as 7 million man hours and Rs. 100 crore in productivity are lost to gridlocks, making the capital the worst congested city in India."

The only way out is widening the six-lane Ring Road to "18- 24 lanes and doubling the carriageways of the other arterial roads" to avoid gridlocked traffic.

"But where is the space?" Roychowdhury asks, adding, "Public transportation holds the key." New estimates show that daily travel trips in Delhi are expected to explode from 15 million today to 25.3 million in 2020.

Delhi might have the most extensive road network at 21 per cent of its geographical area but it is saturated and choked with vehicles. Of 170 traffic locations surveyed by RITES, about 70 locations were found to be carrying more vehicles than their design capacity.

The urban development ministry, however, links the capital's congestion to the National Capital Region(NCR)' sâ€” Noida, Ghaziabad, Gurgaon, Faridabad and other satellite citiesâ€” mismanaged traffic system.

"Half of the woes on city roads are because of congestion spillover from the NCR, where several road and flyover projects are still incomplete," urban development secretary Sudhir Krishna said.

Krishna, in fact, recently met officials from Haryana and Uttar Pradesh to speed up the Eastern and Western Peripheral Expressways. The Eastern Peripheral Expressway or KGPâ€” Sonepat(Kundli)-Ghaziabad-Palwalâ€” is a proposed super highway which will bypass Delhi on the eastern side.

The Western Peripheral Expressway or KMP Expresswayâ€” Kundli-Manesar-Palwalâ€” is being constructed in Haryana. Once ready, both will take a huge traffic burden off Delhi's roads.

Unwanted traffic

"We can stop unwanted traffic from entering Delhi. About 12 lakh vehicles pass through the capital daily, clogging its nine highways," he said.

The scene is equally bad on roads connecting Delhi with Gurgaon, Faridabad, Noida, Loni and Ghaziabad. This is most starkly evident on the National Highway-8(Delhi-Gurgaon), which was designed for a peak traffic volume of 1.6 lakh vehicles by 2015.

But already 1.3 lakh vehicles fight for space on that road today.

What has the ministry worried is that though the Master Plan projection for public transport usage is an impressive 80 per cent by 2020, it has actually slipped to under 40 per cent at current rates.